Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats,” the New York Times reported on Monday.

In other words, the CIA and the fanatical Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia and Qatar are supporting and arming al-Qaeda in much the same way they did in Libya. In order to mute this reality, the Times describes the rebels as “hard-line Islamic jihadists” and repeats the widely debunked fallacy that the United States really wants to support “more secular opposition groups” attacking the government of Syria.

They “are the ones who know how to fight,” Karaveli told The Voice of Russia earlier this month. “They have the fighting experience from Afghanistan and other places and they have been pouring in to Syria from Afghanistan, Yemen and Caucasus. This has become a gathering for Jihadists. Of course there is a big prize for them to win if they would be able to establish a base of the new al-Qaeda within the Arabs and the Muslim Middle East – that would be a huge victory and their biggest victory so far for al-Qaeda.”

Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told CNN and the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur that the CIA supported Osama bin Laden in the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA’s al-Qaeda also played an instrumental role in helping Kosovo rebels wage their war against Serbia. Moreover, al-Qaeda has been “proselytizing jihadism” to the mujahideen in Chechnya and the Caucasus, according to Radio Free Europe, a propaganda operation run by the CIA.

In Syria, the Salafi strain of Sunni fanaticism dominates the so-called rebels, according to the International Crisis Group. They “seek to replace the secular regime with an Islamist form of governance” and are mesmerized by al-Qaeda’s “concept of global jihad.”

The plan for Syria is almost identical to the one now destroying Libya. An unnamed Middle Eastern diplomat told the New York Times al-Qaeda and its Salafist comrades lack “a coherent blueprint for governing Syria” and are perpetually riven by factionalism and rivalry.

The plan underway in Syria calls for balkanizing the country into Sunni, Alawite-Shiite, Kurdish and Druze enclaves that will act as “a natural ‘buffer’ for Israel against both Sunni and Shi’ite Islamist forces,” according Sherkoh Abbas, a veteran Kurdish dissident. “We need to break Syria into pieces,” he told the neocon-dominated Jerusalem Post in May.

Syria is now undergoing the neocon contrived “Clean Break” formulated in the 1990s by the neocons and current Israeli prime minister and radical Likudnik Benjamin Netanyahu. The A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm policy document calls for “rebuilding Zionism” and for Israel to work jointly with Jordan and Turkey to “contain, destabilize, and roll-back” the Arab and Muslim world.

Both Turkey and Jordan are currently playing important roles in the effort to destroy Syria and turn it into a cauldron of sectarian violence. An earlier phase of the “Clean Break” agenda successfully destroyed Iraq and converted it into a refuge for the CIA’s al-Qaeda (the “new growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq, is not entirely unexpected,” the Associated Press argues).

If we are to understand what is happening in Syria now, we need to examine the long-running neocon agenda in the Middle East.

As Jason Vest noted more than a decade ago, the “Clean Break” document and agenda call for “a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment,” events that are now occurring under the guise of humanitarian intervention and the so-called “Arab Spring.”